Chicago, IL Depot: C&NW Rosehill Cemetery Station

(Satellite)

Also, search for "rosehill" in AbandonedRaillines.

When this stop was built by 1856 on the Chicago & Milwaukee RR (a predecessor of C&NW), it was the only stop between downtown Chicago and Evanston. When Rosehill Cemetery opened on July 29, 1859, this stop was renamed from Chittenden to Rosehill before the tracks were elevated in 1908-09. By this time the Edgewater neighborhood had three stations along this route. On Dec 1, 1958, all three of these were part of the 22 stations in Chicago and the near suburbs that were closed. [EdgewaterHistory-milwaukee]

In the 1800s, C&NW ran a daily funeral train leaving the Wells Street Station at 12:30 to the Rosehill and Calvary Cemeteries. A "corpse ticket," which cost about double the regular fare paid for the coffin to be transported on a one way trip in the baggage car. An entire coach car could be charted for $15 to accommodate the mourners. That fee includes transporting the deceased. Additional coach cars cost $12 each. [ChicagoAndCookCountyCemeteries-train]

ChicagoAndCookCountyCemeteries-station

3D Satellite

After the tracks were elevated, a building was built on the west side next to the tracks that had an elevator to lower the coffins. (The depot was on the east side. That is another reminder that C&NW ran its trains left-handed.)

ChicagoAndCookCountyCemeteries-train and ChicagoAndCookCountyCemeteries-station

And a sidewalk was built along the embankment so that the mourners could easily get down to the main entrance of the cemetery.

Street View
[Behind that No Parking sign is a stairwell of which Sibio has a better photo.]

I'm using what appears to be the modern spelling convention of Rosehill because a lot of sources called the cemetery and station Rose Hill. And Rose Hill is a clerical error because the land was Roe's Hill after the farmer who owned this land. The 1859 site of Rosehill was "the highest elevation in the city and the second highest in all of Cook County." The city wanted dry land to which they could relocate three thousand bodies from the old municipal cemetery on the lakefront. [EdgewaterHistory-cemetery] The city had learned that bodies buried near their drinking water source had contributed to their cholera and typhoid problems.